He wasfunny.
And if she was being truthful with herself, she’d thought he was funny from the very first.
His wit was as subtly dangerous as the rest of him. It sneaked up on you like a sunrise and took you over until you were lit all through with a sort of quiet and total delight.
She couldn’t speak. They regarded each other across the table. Her eyes still burned strangely with some suppressed emotion. As did her heart. Like joy or fury, only too bound in thorns and brambles to get a good look at it.
And that’s precisely how it would stay: bound. It could strain all it wanted at those bonds.
She had more sense than that.
He pushed the foolscap back to her.
“Write it using all of the pronouns and verb tenses,” he suggested. Then he dipped his quill, and he resumed writing, and in seconds it was as though she was forgotten.
Chapter Eleven
Twilight was his cue to change into a fresh shirt. He would not be dining with the boardinghouse citizens tonight; instead, he would be dining with the Earl of Langley and his family, and he saw no reason to beg off. The Earl of Langley, who, of course, had a pretty daughter.
He slowly wound his cravat while he studied his reflection in the mirror. He was no Byron. He was no Giancarlo Giannini, for that matter. But he saw nothing to lament, unless it was the passage of time. He looked the way a man ought to when he’d lived a life like his. He’d seen himself reflected in the eyes of women and men; he was satisfied with what they reflected back to him.
But he’d never seen any woman look at him the way Mariana had this afternoon.
He finally understood the single word that described how he’d felt when he’d seen Giancarlo’s hands on her:
Mine.
James had been willing to do violence for her, because he wanted her.
It was perhaps precisely that primal.
Why have you never kissed me?
Simmering beneath their civility, beneath his control, beneath the tightening weave of intimacy, this feralwanthad been biding its time.
This notion played hell with his equilibrium.Hewas the one who commanded. He had imposed his masterful control and order on the chaos of war. And his entire being had been shaped around protecting, as best he could, people—and an entire country—from terrible dangers and bad decisions. He’d made excruciatingly difficult choices and shouldered impossible responsibilities without complaint because he was needed. Because he could.
And because his pride would not release him from a contract with himself.
He might be known throughout the land; he knew he was admired, if not revered.
He didn’t suppose he was loved.
He drew the silk folds of his cravat slowly through his fist. Imagining, as he did, sliding his hand along her lovely throat to cup her breast, and thumb her nipple erect beneath the muslin as her eyes went dark and hazy.
Lust was a bolt through him. His vision all but blurred with it.
He breathed through it like pain.
How thetonwould laugh at him if they knew the run of his thoughts: Valkirk brought low by the Harlot of Haywood Street. Because he was just one more man who wanted Mariana. One more man on the precipice of making a fool of himself overa woman other men had made fools of themselves over.
He’d spent a lifetime ensuring he’d never be spoken of in the same breath as “other men.” And he wouldn’t tolerate being thought of as a fool.
And it was quite the irony that his desire to take her was precisely as ferocious as his desire to protect her from men like himself. And from nasty little bits of gossip like that. So she could go on being herself, safely. So she could have what she wanted from the world. So she could rise.
Because other men would notseeher. They would only partake of her. And this notion, for some reason, he found unbearable.
He could not deny that his pride was satisfied that she wanted him, too. Not because he was a duke. But because she, like he, just couldn’t help it. It was simply how things were between them.
